"Because framing you did two jobs at once." She was moving now, fast, the way she gets when a thing finally lines up. "It killed the investigation, because if everyone knows the Kerrigans did it, nobody looks anywhere else. And it lit a war between our families that never actually happened, because I went into the ground instead of going to the community."
"Whoever did this was banking on you dead, or too young to matter," I said, and I let myself look at her then, at all of it, the wall of paper and the years of work and the woman who'd built the whole of it alone in a room over a bar. "They didn't account for you."
The two collections laid on top of each other made a different picture than the one she'd worked from on her own. Sharper. It didn't point at a family with a hunger for territory. It pointed at one person with something to hide and the money to hide it in blood.
I saw her come up to say it. And I saw Cormac already sitting there with it, because he'd got there the same half-secondshe had. Whatever passed between the two of them then had nothing to do with the case. It was two people finding out they run at the same speed, which is a rarer thing to stumble on in a life than anyone tells you, and I clocked it clean and waited on the part of me that was supposed to mind.
It didn't show up.
Interesting. I banked that for later and got to my feet. "Coffee," I said, to the room, mostly to give the pair of them somewhere else to point their hands, and the moment closed over like water.
"The money," Sienna said. "Where did it go."
"That's the job," Cormac said. "The transactions stop six months before the attack. They closed the channel before they moved. But money doesn't evaporate. It went somewhere."
"And wherever it went," Ronan said, "is where they are."
He had the face on him he gets when he's decided a thing. Not the managing one, not the careful one. The one underneath both, the one that means he's going to do what needs doing and hand you the bill for arguing about it.
"We need the originals," Sienna said. "The real bank records, before anybody touched them. My father kept physical copies in a second place. A solicitor in Galway. I've never been able to reach them, because I was never willing to surface as anyone tied to the Madigan estate."
"But you could now," I said.
She let that sit. And I watched her weigh it, whatever it was, somewhere I couldn't reach.
"Claire Byrne can't walk into a Galway solicitor's and claim the Madigan records," she said. A breath. "But Sienna Madigan can."
And she said it. Her own name, out of her own mouth, set on the table like a card she'd decided to play.
The room went still around the name.
I know a fair amount about the people in that room. It's the job, the real one, under the cooking and the mouth. So I knew, watching her, that she hadn't said it out loud in fifteen years. Not thought it. Said it. On purpose. As hers. And I watched it land in her the way a thing lands when you've kept it locked away so long you'd half forgotten it still had weight.
Then I did the other thing I do, which is watch Ronan.
He didn't say it back. I knew he wouldn't. He'd been carrying her name somewhere behind his own face since Chicago, and he wasn't going to spend it here, in a war room, over bank records. He kept steady on her and he waited. And I read the whole of it off him, because I've been reading him twenty years. Her name was the one thing in that house he hadn't been given yet, and he'd sooner go into the ground than lift it off the table before she handed it to him.
Soft bastard. Takes one to know one.
"Not yet," she said. "I'm not ready to surface yet."
Ronan nodded once. "Whenever you're ready."
"It needs to be soon." Cormac, not pushing, just true. "If we're being watched, and we are, every day we wait is a day he's closer to those records. And your Chicago man's still dark. Four days now." A beat. "I've stopped calling that a coincidence."
So had I.
"Give me a few days," she said.
"You have them," Ronan said.
She straightened and took the four of us in, and there was something in her face I couldn't quite read, which almost never happens, so I banked it with the rest. Whatever it was, it wasn't fear. It looked more like a woman running the arithmetic on what standing in a room like this actually costs, and finding, to her own surprise, that she could afford it.
"Right," she said. "What else."
Cormac almost smiled. I decided to count it as a win.
We worked until the light outside went from gray to the dark gold you only get on this coast in late October, and somewhere in there I got up and made food nobody had asked for, because feeding people is the one prayer I know all the words to. We ate standing up with the fire going and the case spread between us, and for a while it stopped feeling like four strangers sharing a table and started feeling like something with a shape to it.